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Blogs by Center for Exoplanet & Habitable World Members

Habitable Zone Planet Finder Team

• HPF Discovers a Close-In Neptune Orbiting a Very Low-Mass Star
  Artist’s rendering of the Neptune-mass exoplanet orbiting the very low-mass star LHS 3154.  Video Credit: Abigail Minnich Introduction As the name implies, the Habitable-zone Planet Finder was designed primarily to search for Earthlike planets orbiting nearby stars.  Its sensitivity to … Continue reading →
• TOI-3785 b: A Low-Density Neptune Orbiting an M-dwarf Star
  By Luke Powers The planet now known as TOI-3785 b was observed in 2019 by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TESS observed periodic dips in the star’s brightness (known as a transit) that occurred every 4.67 days. As TOI-3785 … Continue reading →
• New Science, and a History Lesson: a Giant Planet Orbiting Gliese 463
  Introduction: the HET/HRS M dwarf Survey HPF is the latest and greatest in Doppler searches for exoplanets orbiting the Galaxy’s smallest stars, but it is certainly not the first, even at Texas’ McDonald Observatory.  Before HPF came on sky, astronomers … Continue reading →
• The Unusual Transit of TOI-3884b: A Pole-Spot Crossing Super-Neptune
  The TESS Mission For the past five years, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has surveyed the sky searching for new planets orbiting our closest stellar companions. To accomplish this colossal task, this satellite stares at hundreds of thousands of … Continue reading →
• TOI-5205 b: A Forbidden Planet?
  The Discovery For the past four years alongside the HPF survey to discover new exoplanets, we have also been using HPF to follow-up on planet candidates discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission. The TESS survey is observing … Continue reading →

NEID Spectrograph Team

• NEID measures a spin-orbit angle for a long period planet
  Background The TESS mission continues to discover fruitful exoplanet systems ripe for various types of detailed study, including with NEID. Recently, we investigated the spin-orbit angle of a planet in the TOI-1670 system. The NEID team has investigated this kind … Continue reading →
• Constraining the Spin-Orbit angle of the Young Warm Neptune TOI-2076b with NEID
  Beyond Discovery High-resolution, super-precise instruments like NEID can do much more than just discover new exoplanets and measure their masses.  For certain planets, NEID may be able to detect molecules in their atmospheres, or–as we will see here–measure detailed properties … Continue reading →
• NEID Validates a Venus-like Exoplanet
  Despite challenges caused by a global pandemic, the NEID team has adapted, and is already putting out important new exoplanet science.  Much of the early science efforts with NEID have focused on detailed characterization of new exoplanets discovered by the … Continue reading →
• NEID Passes Operational Readiness Review
  It’s been a long time coming! As of this writing, it has been almost exactly five years since NEID was selected as the design for the extremely precise radial velocity instrument to be developed through NASA and the NSF’s joint … Continue reading →
• NEID graces the cover of IEEE Spectrum
  An article discussing the innovative technology used in the NEID Spectrometer is featured in this month’s issue of IEEE Spectrum Magazine.  IEEE Spectrum is the official magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a professional society dedicated to the … Continue reading →

Jason Wright: AstroWright

• Planck Frequencies as Schelling Points in SETI
  Early when I was learning about SETI I was reading about “magic frequencies” and the “Water Hole.” Back in the early days of radio SETI, instrumental bandwidths were pretty narrow, so Frank Drake and others had to guess what frequencies to observe at to find deliberate signals. One wants a high frequency to avoid interference […]
• Is SETI dangerous?
  Interdisciplinarity in science can be wonderful: combining expertise across disciplines leads to new insights and progress because it’s only when people from those disciplines communicate about a particular problem that progress is made, and that happens much more rarely than communications among members of a single discipline. It’s important, though, when working across disciplines to actually […]
• The astrophysical sources of RV jitter
  A big day for our understanding of RV jitter!   Penn State graduate student Jacob Luhn has just posted two important papers to the arXiv. You can read his excellent writeup of the first of them here:   https://sites.psu.edu/jacobkluhn/2020/04/30/paper-highlight-radial-velocity-jitter-of-600-planet-search-stars/ It took Jacob a HUGE amount of work to determine the *empirical* RV jitter of hundreds […]
• On Meeting Your Heroes
  Freeman Dyson died on Friday. He was a giant in science, possibly the most accomplished and foundational living physicist without a Nobel Prize. He was 96. He had a big influence on my turn to SETI. I’ve written about him several times on this blog, including about his “First Law of SETI Investigations”, his role […]
• Technosignatures White Papers
  Here, in one place, are the white papers submitted last year to the Astronomy & Astrophysics decadal survey panels: “Searching for Technosignatures: Implications of Detection and Non-Detection” Haqq-Misra et al. (pdf, ADS) “The Promise of Data Science for the Technosignatures Field” Berea et al. (pdf, ADS) “A Technosignature Carrying a Message Will Likely Inform us […]

Facebook Pages by Center for Exoplanet & Habitable World Members

• Penn State Astronomy Outreach

• Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics

Twitter Feeds by Center for Exoplanet & Habitable World Members

• Jason Wright: @Astro_Wright
• Steinn Sigurdsson: @steinly0
• The Habitable Zone Planet Finder Team: @HPFspectrograph
• NEID: @NEID_at_WIYN

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